Neighborhood Youth Association

Neighborhood Youth Association
Building a better future one kid at a time

Monday, April 4, 2011

Week 9-Test Stand

To separate this class from a typical hobby rocket building class we decided to incorporate some elements that dive a bit deeper into the engineering that goes on in the rocket industry.  One of the biggest steps in manufacturing a rocket is the testing process.  This allows an engine to be qualified and characterized before it is integrated onto the vehicle and flown.  During the test, millions of pieces of data are recorded and analyzed to fully understand how the particular rocket will perform in flight.  We wanted to bring a scaled down version of this to the NYA rocket class.

A test-stand was built fit for the types of rockets we were using.  This test stand had a load cell to measure the thrust output of the engine.  A thrust vs. time plot was generated, which gave the students a real understanding of how these rockets perform.  After testing an A, B, and C engine we went inside and gave them each a thrust plot and they had to figure out which engine it was based on the average thrust, burn time, and delay time.  This was an interesting project that all of the students really got into. 

The students were asked to find the thrust at each division of the graph and average them all together to get an average thrust.  Next, they had to find the burn time, multiply it by the average thrust to come up with a specific impulse.  Finally, they had to find the delay time.  Once all of these three elements were found they could figure out the engine designation.

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